Sarah AF > Sarah AF's Quotes

“Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's no matter--tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther.... And one fine morning-- So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

“The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.”
― L.P. Hartley, The Go-Between

“It was unbelievably heady to feel so profoundly understood, not like they were beyond words, but as though the words had a breathless inevitability about them, as if the depth of each other's interest was a psychic magnet, pulling their truest selves into articulation.”
― Lila Savage, Say Say Say

“Love', the word, is at the centre of tennis. It is embedded in the unique and eccentric scoring system. Love meaning nothing - zero. Playing for love. That it was, uniquely, a sport in which woman and men played together made it a 'love game' in a social and romantic sense.”
― Elizabeth Wilson, Love Game: A History of Tennis, from Victorian Pastime to Global Phenomenon

“To approach tennis with 'love' may be dangerous if, as Oscar Wilde wrote, 'each man kills the thing he loves' - whether because that love is too obsessive or too critical. Many critics believed that 'love' in tennis was dangerous - that the very fact of this word being used in the scoring system rendered it unmanly. But love is also a hopeful word of celebration; and in the end, the point of writing about tennis is to celebrate the beauty, the glamour and the joy of this unique game.”
― Elizabeth Wilson, Love Game: A History of Tennis, from Victorian Pastime to Global Phenomenon

“There is no immortality that is not built on friendship and done with care. All the secrets in the world worth knowing are hiding in plain sight.”
― Robin Sloan, Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore

“Some said that the Amazons used to burn off their right breasts so that no womanly appendage could get in the way of the bowstring or impede their spear-arm.”
― Ferdie Addis, Opening Pandora's Box: Phrases We Borrowed from the Classics and the Stories Behind Them

“The worst of it, as Ella saw it, was not knowing what bits of her psyche were herself and what bits were scar tissue.”
― Lila Savage, Say Say Say

“Some people stay broken. Some pick up the pieces and put them back together with all the sharp edges showing.”
― Dot Hutchison, The Butterfly Garden

“Not for the first time Marianne thinks cruelty does not only hurt the victim, but the perpetrator also, and maybe more deeply and more permanently.”
― Sally Rooney, Normal People

“She closes her eyes. He probably won’t come back, she thinks. Or he will, differently. What they have now they can never have back again. But for her the pain of loneliness will be nothing to the pain that she used to feel, of being unworthy. He brought her goodness like a gift and now it belongs to her. Meanwhile his life opens out before him in all directions at once. They’ve done a lot of good for each other. Really, she thinks, really. People can really change one another.
You should go, she says. I’ll always be here. You know that.”
― Sally Rooney, Normal People

“People told you things over a cup of tea that they wouldn’t under torture.”
― Belinda Bauer, The Facts of Life and Death

“The further away you are from being a white man, the less you are seen by society as being a neutral ‘person’. That’s pretty devastating, isn’t it?”
― Deborah Frances-White, The Guilty Feminist: From Our Noble Goals to Our Worst Hypocrisies

“It is hard to love an addict. Not only practically difficult, in the picking up after them and the handling of those aspects of life they're not able for themselves, but metaphysically hard. It feels like bashing yourself against a wall, not just your head, but your whole self. It makes your heart hard. Caught between ultimatums (stop drinking) and radical acceptance (I love you no matter what) the person who loves the addict exhausts and renews their love on a daily basis.”
― Emilie Pine, Notes To Self

“It can be the easy, in the end, to forget that children are people, and that people will do what people will do, the consequences be damned.”
― Seanan McGuire, Down Among the Sticks and Bones

“Fabulous and fucked up. Absolutely right. That’s what we all are. It’s called being human. Let’s celebrate that, not fear it. And let’s never, ever feel ashamed when the challenges of life become too overwhelming and the fucked-up part gets into the driving seat. That is called being normal.”
― Scarlett Curtis, It's Not OK to Feel Blue (and other lies): Inspirational people open up about their mental health

“Your life is here, now. You’re not about to live a tracing-paper copy of it.”
― Dolly Alderton, Everything I Know About Love

“Yet again, the Queen’s inability to live without her male favourites was in evidence. As usual, she apportioned all blame to the female party.”
― Nicola Tallis, Elizabeth's Rival

“She is selling herself by the inch. The gentlemen all say you are advising her. She wants a present in cash for every advance above her knee.'
'Not like you, Mary. One push backwards and, good girl, here's your fourpence.'
'Well. You know. If king are doing the pushing." She laughs. "Anne has very long legs. By the time he comes to her secret part he will be bankrupt. The French wars will be cheap, in comparison.”
― Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall

“Even though it's only a minority of men who are violent or predatory, I don't know if men realise that girls are trained our entire lives to minimise the danger from you - and blamed if we don't.”
― Sara Pascoe, Sex Power Money

“White supremacy encourages the people it benefits to create their own parallel universe, their own set of facts and explanations about the existence of and prevalence of racism. Even as white people insist that "no one really knows what happened", they can immediately share an explanation that eases their anxiety and shame.”
― Desmond Cole, The Skin We're In: A Year of Black Resistance and Power

“Patiently educating a clueless white person about race is draining. It takes all your powers of persuasion. Because it’s more than a chat about race. It’s ontological. It’s like explaining to a person why you exist, or why you feel pain, or why your reality is distinct from their reality. Except it’s even trickier than that. Because the person has all of Western history, politics, literature, and mass culture on their side, proving that you don’t exist.”
― Cathy Park Hong, Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning

“Their delusion is also tacit in the community heard defensive retort to Black Lives Matter that "all lives matter." Rather than being inclusive, "all" is a walled-off pronoun, a defensive measure to "not make it about race" so that the invisible hegemony of whiteness can continue unchallenged.”
― Cathy Park Hong, Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning

“They speak of 'the football season', but as far as I am aware the football season takes an entire calendar year to go full cycle. I believe there might be a day somewhere in early July, every other year, where football is not happening. One that day there is twenty-four hours of programming in which the men in front of the green screens discuss how much they can't wait to have football back.”
― Laura Lexx, Klopp Actually: (Imaginary) Life with Football's Most Sensible Heartthrob

“It is our choices, Harry, that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities.”
― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets

“Imagine spending four days dying from 6DM and saving all your hate up for one final message only to have it ruined by bad grammar.”
― Bethany Clift, Last One at the Party

“And I wonder what the sound of a heart breaking might be. And I think it might be quiet, unperceptively so, and not dramatic at all. Like the sound of an exhausted swallow falling gently to earth.”
― Sarah Winman, Tin Man

“There's something about first love, isn't there? she said. It's untouchable to those who played no part in it. But it's the measure of all that follows.”
― Sarah Winman, Tin Man